Sam Thielman

Sam Thielman is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo based in Manhattan. He has worked as a reporter and critic for the Guardian, Variety, Adweek and Newsday, where he covered stories from the hacking attacks on US and international targets by Russian GRU and FSB security services to the struggle to bring broadband internet to the Navajo nation. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son and too many comic books.

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Sam

As the lights went down on a stage full of international beauty queens at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, former Spice Girl Mel B and NBC anchor Thomas Roberts announced a musical performer recognizable to few outside of Russia and Azerbaijan. The show’s bookings weren’t always A-listers, but they were often respectable: Gavin DeGraw, Seal, Lady Gaga.

The pageant was meant to be the first major international platform for Emin Agalarov, the 37-year-old Azeri pop singer (then 32) and heir to the $1.91 billion fortune of real estate baron Aras Agalarov. The 2013 Miss Universe pageant now is notable for a much different reason: special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Trumpworld connections to Russia has reportedly expanded to investigate President Trump’s Russia-related business transactions, including the Moscow pageant, which was bankrolled by Aras Agalarov.

Though the younger Agalarov’s role in his family’s political dealings has all but vanished in his father’s long shadow, oligarchs and politicians in Russia and the former Soviet bloc often see pop singers as power brokers. Emin himself admitted in an Irish Examiner interview that “I end up singing songs that I believe in — that don’t necessarily need to earn me a living,” which puts the onus on his father’s real estate businesses to support his singing career. But it doesn’t follow that Emin is a joke outside the music world: though it didn’t rocket the singer to international fame, the $20 million deal between the Agalarovs and the Trumps bring Miss Universe to Moscow is a familiar sight to those in the region who have often seen pop stars at the center of political power.

Emin has made headlines recently for brokering the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and a Russian lawyer promising damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government campaign of support for the elder Trump’s presidential bid. But he began making overtures to the Trump family on his own behalf through Olivia Culpo, Miss Universe 2012, who appeared in one of Emin’s music videos. The Miss Universe organization must have felt it had something to gain from the relationship: Erin Brady, Miss USA 2013, told the New York Times that she and other contestants were required to appear without pay in that same video as part of the competition.

Emin explained in an interview on the Crocus Group’s website, after filming the music video with Culpo “we met with her managers [Miss Universe head Paula Shugart, according to Mother Jones], they came to Russia and met with Aras [Agalarov]. Then we all met with Donald Trump and shook hands.” Emin and Trump remained friends. Trump appeared in another music video for Emin the next year, again alongside pageant contestants, this time clad in their sashes, and Trump also sent him a happy birthday video.

The Miss Universe pageant came to the Agalarovs’ Crocus City Hall at a hefty price: $20 million, which Aras Agalarov said at the time included nearly $7m—a third of of the total outlay—in license fees to the Trump businesses.

The 37-year-old singer, handsome and compact, is “unerringly nice,” according to Michael Idov, a Russian-American journalist who wrote about his brief encounter with Emin in his forthcoming book “Dressed for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow.” But even when Emin’s career trappings have to be purchased, they are lavish, despite the singer’s extremely small footprint outside Russia—his American album sales number 700, total, according to Nielsen Soundscan.

“I obviously didn’t peek into his finances, but it stands to reason that his music career is an investment, not a business,” Idov told TPM.

Pop acts are a familiar lever of control in Russia and in former Soviet bloc countries. Philip Kirkorov, who appears on Aras Agalarov’s Instagram with the billionaire and his son, notably campaigned in 2004 for Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin-friendly Ukrainian ruler who was successfully installed with the help of Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Kirkorov was one of many stars recruited to stump for Yanukovych, the BBC reported, but he was the only one to get the candidate’s name wrong and accidentally call for the election of his opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yuschenko, instead. Grigory Lepsveridze, known as Grigory Leps on stage, has sung several duets with Emin; in 2013 the U.S. treasury imposed sanctions on Lepsveritdze for acting as a courier for Vladislav Leontyev, an accused Russian drug lord.

American pop stars sometimes work for strongmen as well: Also in 2013, Jennifer Lopez sang Happy Birthday to Turkmen ruler Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, notable for forced labor in his country’s cotton-picking industry and disappearing his political rivals, according to Amnesty International. Lopez apologized after the fact, though she had also performed for wealthy Uzbek and Azeri businessmen for million-dollar fees.

Aras Agalarov’s posts to Instagram show a man firmly in Vladimir Putin’s good graces in the weeks before Miss Universe in Moscow. In October 2013, Aras posted pictures of Putin pinning a medal, the Order of Honor, on his chest. Two weeks afterward, he posted another picture of himself, his son, and the future American president, sitting in front of a backdrop branded with the the name of the Agalarovs’ Crocus Group, the Mercedes-Benz logo, the logo of state-owned Russian bank Sberbank, and of course, in all capitals, TRUMP.

Emin’s career continues, although Miss Universe didn’t launch him to stardom the way he’d reportedly hoped. He played a set with eye-popping technical effects in front of the Winter Palace in December 2016 with 16-time Grammy winner David Foster playing the piano. A few PBS affiliates bought the recording of the concert to play during pledge drives.

Foster did not respond to a request for comment. A publicist for Emin directed TPM to Scott Balber, a lawyer retained by the Agalarovs to address questions raised by their contact with the Trumps; Balber did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A media representative for the December concert confirmed his identity before saying TPM had the wrong number and hanging up. He did not respond to a follow-up text.

A former Soviet counterintelligence officer-turned-lobbyist was also in the room with Donald Trump, Jr. when he met a Kremlin-linked attorney who promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to NBC News and the Associated Press.

Akhmetshin downplayed the importance of his and Veselnitskaya’s conversation with the Trump campaign. “They couldn’t wait for the meeting to end,” Akhmetshin told the AP. The meeting was “not substantive” and his side of the talks “actually expected a more serious” conversation.

Then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and now his senior advisor, also attended the meeting arranged by music publicist Rob Goldstone at Trump Jr.’s request. Goldstone told Trump Jr. that the information the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, supposedly had to offer was part of the Russian government’s support for the Trump campaign.

Akhmetshin, a Russian émigré, says he has dual citizenship. He told Radio Free Europe in July of last year, “I am an American citizen since 2009 who pays taxes, earned his citizenship after living here since 1994, and swore an oath of loyalty to the United States of America,” protesting his characterization in a lawsuit that accused him of having worked for Russian intelligence. He would have had to declare such ties when he emigrated.

Akhmetshin was in the Russian army from 1986 to 1988, he told the AP, but he said that he had not done counterintelligence work. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has accused Akhmetshin of working for the Russian GRU security service.

A career lobbyist, Akhmetshin was reportedly working at the time of the Trump Tower meeting for Denis Katsyv, head of the real estate firm Prevezon group that was ensnared in a U.S. investigation of a vast alleged Russian money-laundering scandal that had damaged the reputation of both Katsyv and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That Veselnitskaya, Katsyv’s attorney, was represented as an agent of the Russian government in Goldstone’s emails with Trump Jr. suggests ties between Putin’s interests and Katsyv’s.

Dominating headlines this week is the startling revelation that Donald Trump, Jr. met with a Kremlin-connected attorney who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

But that June 2016 meeting, which the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended, served another purpose for the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskya, and her wealthy client Denys Katsyv: It was a stop on a major PR tour against a sanctions bill.

Katsyv had retained Veselnitskaya as his defense counsel in a vast money-laundering scandal ensnaring his consortium of businesses, the Prevezon Group. But the Russian real estate baron was associated with another operation at work under the anodyne name of the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, which was founded in February 2016 and dedicated to the apparently noble mission of helping “restart American adoption of Russian children.” When the meeting was first reported by the New York Times, Trump Jr. said only that he and Veselnitskaya met to discuss the adoption issue.

Veselnitskaya had been accused of lobbying U.S. officials on behalf of the foundation before. The foundation had just two registered lobbyists, one of whom, Rinat Akhmetshin, had worked for Russian counterintelligence. And the foundation wasn’t asking for the reinstatement of an adoption program; it was, at least by implication, offering it. The group sought the alteration of a U.S. sanctions program that was about to become law, the Global Magnitsky Act, which was named after a dead Russian whistleblower. The original Magnitsky Act, enacted in 2012, had annoyed Russian President Vladimir Putin so much that he banned American adoptions of Russian children in retaliation; the expanded version had him enraged.

“What’s happening around the time of her meeting with Don, Jr. is the most serious-resourced and aggressive counterattack ever that the Kremlin has mounted on the Magnitsky Act,” one congressional aide told TPM. “They have learned over the years in their attempts to fight and derail this and they have gotten better at it. They’ve involved less ham-handed folks, and less people who might be out of central casting.”

In his 2007 book “The Oil and the Glory,” journalist Steve LeVine describes the charming “English-speaking former Soviet Army counterintelligence officer” Akhmetshin as he appeared in 1999, when he went to work lobbying Washington on behalf of crusading Kazakh politician Akezhan Kazhegeldin. “The stylish Akhmetshin looked harmless enough, with his designer spectacles and fresh, youthful face,” LeVine wrote.

Akhmetshin, who has said repeatedly that he no longer works for Russian intelligence, did not return multiple calls to a number listed under his name in Washington, D.C. But even as a beltway freelancer, Akhmetshin has been involved in Russian and Eastern Bloc politics for two decades, so the now-notorious Magnitsky affair is firmly in his wheelhouse.

Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing accountant who died in prison in 2009, apparently after being severely beaten, had become a cause célèbre after Chicago-born millionaire William Browder, who had retained Magnitsky’s firm to investigate irregularities in his Russian businesses, publicized the conditions of his death. Magnitsky had been imprisoned after he exposed the alleged money-laundering scheme in which Katsyv was implicated while working for Browder. Browder, an investment banker with significant Russian holdings, had become a key witness for then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s prosecution of Katsyv and Prevezon, which the government settled at the end of May, less than a week before jury selection was to begin.

Naming the law after Magnitsky goaded Putin and Katsyv alike, as it emphasized apparent corruption in Putin’s regime and Katsyv’s alleged complicity in the same. Both want it renamed. Katsyv employed Akhmetshin to explore the corridors of power for ways to accomplish that.

Browder told TPM that Veselnitskaya’s 2016 meeting with Trump Jr. didn’t surprise him in the least. “They were trying to get in touch with anybody who had any power,” he said. “I’m sure they’d have tried to contact the Clinton campaign if they thought they would help.”

The investor also caught Akhmetshin at a recent hearing—a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Putin’s Russia that Veselnitskaya also attended, according to the Daily Beast. Browder provided two photos to TPM, shown at the top of the page and below.

By 2006, Akhmetshin was at work in Washington on behalf of Azeri politicians, according to lobbying disclosures. In 2011, he was accused of participating in an attempt to paint asylum-seeking Russian bureaucrat Ashot Egiazaryan as an anti-Semite in order to enlist Jewish groups to prevent him from being admitted to the United States (Browder echoed the accusation that Akhmetshin smeared Egiazaryan in a phone interview). Akhmetshin has never registered as a foreign agent, however, according to complaints Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has filed with the Justice Department.

Akhmetshin acknowledged to Politico last year that he previously worked for Russian counterintelligence, but protested that “Just because I was born in Russia doesn’t mean I am an agent of [the] Kremlin.” The context for Akhmetsin’s semi-denial is striking: he met multiple times with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Politico reported, once in April 2016 at the lobby bar of the Westin Grand Hotel in Berlin and then a month later at Rohrabacher’s office.

Whether Katsyv and Putin are working in concert or have coincidentally aligned goals, Rohrabacher had already received a document from a Moscow politician that made explicit a quid pro quo that lobbying boilerplate from Katsyv’s foundation only implies. Rename the Magnitsky Act, it said, and Putin will drop the adoption ban he imposed in retaliation, according to a Politico reporter who saw the document. After the May 18 meeting in Rohrabacher’s office, the California Republican proposed changing the name on the legislation, calling it “a gratuitous slap at Russia.”

On June 9, Veselnitskaya met with Trump Jr. And less than a week after that fateful rendezvous at Trump Tower, Akhmetshin was planning what Katsyv must have hoped would be the most memorable part of the anti-Magnitsky Act publicity blitz: The screening of a documentary that would tell his version of the Magnitsky affair.

A well-regarded Russian documentarian named Andrei Nekrasov had agreed to tell Katsyv’s version of events, and despite Browder’s attempt to sue Nekrasov to prevent the film’s distribution, it screened at the Newseum in D.C. on June 13 with a talkback moderated by legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Akhmetshin was in attendance, according to coverage of the screening by Radio Free Europe.

At a glance, the event might have looked as if it had been scheduled by the Newseum, but in fact a D.C. PR firm representing Nekrasov called the Potomac Square Group had rented out the facility. Browder claimed to TPM that Katsyv had bankrolled the entire event, including the film’s production. Akhmetshin denied that the foundation paid for the event.

According to video of the talkback, irate Russian protestors jeered at Hersh and at Nekrasov after the screening.

“He’s not a journalist,” says one protester in a video posted to Veselnitskaya’s Facebook page, apparently about Nekrasov. “He’s a state propagandist, and he’s talking about first amendment in a country where it exists while in Russia, no one can speak because of these people.” A man arguing with him cites Hersh’s bona fides, saying “Just let him finish.”

With a cast of characters like Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Carter Page, it seemed like only a matter of time before at least one of them had to explain a paper trail describing suspicious contact—whether through naïveté or malice—with Russian agents trying to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

It just didn’t seem very likely that the person in question would announce that he had taken a meeting because he had been promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton as part of an explicit Russian government effort to help Donald Trump’s campaign. Or that this person would post the paper trail on Twitter. Or that he would be the President’s eldest son.

On Tuesday at 11 a.m. ET on the nose, Donald Trump, Jr. posted to his public Twitter account a one-paragraph statement followed by four pages of emails between himself and Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist and acquaintance of the Trump family. The emails were whited-out in a few places and described in frank terms what a “Russian government attorney”—Goldstone’s words—had to offer: damaging information about Trump’s presumptive opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, that was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” That effort was “helped along” by Aras Agalarov, the 51st-richest man in Russia and a close ally of both the Russian government and Trump himself, as well as his son Emin Agalarov, a singer and Goldstone’s client.

Goldstone told Trump Jr. the offer came to the Agalarovs through “the Crown Prosecutor of Russia,” an apparent reference to Russia’s Prosecutor General, Putin appointee Yury Chaika, who is known to be close to Veselnitskaya. Goldstone told reporters the reference in the damning email was meant to refer to Veselnitskaya herself when asked to clarify. Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and Manafort, the former campaign chairman, were forwarded that entire email chain, according to the New York Times.

Trump Jr. seemed to believe that releasing those emails on Twitter put the matter to rest, and spent a couple of hours subsequent to the revelations retweeting support from conservative media figures like Mike Huckabee and Bill O’Reilly.

But the revelations didn’t just surprise the media, they reportedly caught even special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with proxies for the Russian government, unawares. And Mueller already had his hands full.

Until this week, the figure most central to that speculation had been Michael Flynn, the ousted national security adviser whose failure to disclose conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. about sanctions cost him his job. It was recently reported that the late GOP operative Peter W. Smith had claimed to have a line to Flynn when he sought out hackers, including two groups he believed to be Russian, that he hoped had stolen information from Clinton’s private email server before she deleted the much-discussed 30,000 emails.

Kushner, too, had become a focus of the investigation on multiple fronts. Mueller reportedly was digging into his finances, especially where his interests with those of Russian state-owned Vnesheconombank. And the President’s son-in-law had come under scrutiny for his work with the Trump campaign’s data machine, part of it run by Cambridge Analytica, a government contractor run by Trump-supporting billionaire Robert Mercer, whose board includes Steve Bannon and has reported business ties to Brietbart. Mueller is reportedly probing both operations for ties to Russia. Kushner also met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, alongside Flynn, about how to “establish a line of communication” between the Russian and American governments—presumably a backchannel that would have excluded American intelligence.

Then there’s Manafort, who had helped to install Viktor Yanukovych, a politician sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, as president of Ukraine. The Trump campaign had removed hawkish language on the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula—formerly controlled by Ukraine—from the Republican Party platform, and public perception of Manafort’s involvement in the policy shift and the subsequent reporting on his work in Ukraine was negative enough that he was ousted from the campaign in favor of Steve Bannon. Manafort has been conspicuous by his silence since his ouster last year, but the spotlight was swinging back in his direction as he retroactively registered as a foreign agent in June.

Page, also long gone from the Trump inner circle, had his own clear and direct ties to Russia, having spoken to Russian businessmen often and worked in the country as an investment banker. He, too, took an unusual meeting with Kislyak. And he also had been a target for recruitment by an agent of the Russian SVR security service named Victor Podobnyy, who contacted Page on the pretext of a deal with Page’s firm, Global Energy Capital. Page never agreed to work on behalf of Podobnyy, but was investigated for his “extensive” contacts in Russia.

Comparatively, the only hint that Trump Jr. may have had dealings with Russians before this week came from remarks he gave at a real estate conference way back in 2008, where he declared that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” His brother, Eric, once made a similar statement to golf reporter James Dodson and later denied making the remark.

Trump Jr. seems to believe he has nothing to hide. He tweeted the emails, he said, in order “to be as transparent as possible.” That much, at least, he has certainly achieved. And if the whole truth isn’t enough, he has a very expensive lawyer.

In July of 2016, Donald Trump, Jr. met a 42-year-old Russian attorney named Natalia Veselnitskaya who had promised him damaging information about then-candidate Hillary Clinton. One of his father’s contacts, a music publicist named Rob Goldstone, had arranged the meeting as a favor to a client of his, the Azeri real estate developer and pop singer Emin. Goldstone had worked with the Trumps on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. There were other reasons to take the meeting, too: Emin’s father, Aras Agalarov, is the 51st-richest man in Russia and an instrumental figure in the President’s aborted foray into Russian real estate: the Moscow tower he tried—and failed—to erect.

Trump Jr. has said he knew absolutely nothing about Veselnitskaya before their meeting, not even her name. She turned out to use the promise of information that could help his father’s campaign as a pretext to discuss reinstating a popular Russian-American adoption program, according to his version of events. What could be more harmless?

In fact, Veselnitskaya was already a key figure for the defense in one of the most notorious money-laundering scandals in recent memory, encompassing $230 million in public funds allegedly stolen from the Russians by a network of corrupt bureaucrats and routed into real estate sales, including some in Manhattan, through ironclad Swiss bank accounts. And she was accused of lobbying U.S. officials for a Russian NGO that sought to overturn the Russian ban on U.S. adoptions, according to a complaint filed with the U.S. Justice Department and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).

Veselnitskaya’s Facebook page paints a picture of a conservative Russian woman eager to defend her government from insults, hawkish on Israel and deeply concerned about American politics. “Liberalism is a fucking mental disorder,” she wrote on July 1, 2016—American liberalism. She also had derisive remarks for Brooklyn-born Muslim organizer Linda Sarsour and crusading former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was ousted by Trump. “The current U.S. Attorney General (Sally Yates) stated that all lawyers working for the government do not have the right to defend the government and trump orders!” Veselnitskaya wrote on Jan. 31. “In such cases, the general should resign.”

Veselnitskaya received her degree from Kutafin Moscow State Law University in 1998. In 2013, she agreed to represent Denis Katsyv, the son of Russian railroad baron Petr Katsyv and owner of the Prevezon group. The younger Katsyv was accused of collaborating with corrupt Russian officials in the money-laundering scheme. Then-U.S. attorney and “Sheriff of Wall Street” Preet Bharara led the charge against Prevezon; the company, his office said, had used cash from the theft to buy condos in Bharara’s jurisdiction.

Katsyv had been Veselnitskaya’s highest-profile client by far, and his defense would be a world-historic success not just for the wealthy real estate investor, but for the Russian establishment under President Vladimir Putin.

Until this weekend, the closest Veselnitskaya had come to the public eye was as a footnote to the compounding scandal of the Prevezon affair. Veselnitskaya had come to the United States with Katsyv, who was to be deposed by Bharara’s team. Not only wasn’t she deposed herself, she didn’t attend her client’s deposition in person. But after the deposition, she moved to the Plaza Hotel for the remaining two nights of her stay at a cost of $995 per night. Her firm then billed the U.S. government for the entire stay, as well as a single meal for five that included eight grappas, two bottles of wine, eighteen dishes and a bill that came to nearly $800. The group’s total expenses topped $50,000, and they promised to file more.

The legal proceedings in which Veselnitskaya was enmeshed contain a spy novel’s-worth of twists, turns and tragic, suspicious accidents. Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing accountant who called attention to Russian bureaucrats’ alleged widespread embezzlement, was arrested and detained without trial for nearly a year until his death in 2009 from what prison staff described as “pancreonecrosis, ruptured abdominal membrane and toxic shock,” according to the U.S. government’s suit against Prevezon. The Russian Interior Ministry later revised the cause of death to heart failure. When Magnitsky’s family examined his body, they found bruises and that his fingers had been broken, according to an early draft of a report by then-president Dmitry Medvedev’s own investigative committee.

The incident led to a controversial piece of legislation: 2012’s Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned 18 Russian officials believed by the US to have been involved in Magnitsky’s death. Five days later, the Russian parliament voted to ban adoptions of Russian children by Americans, a move understood to be retaliation for the Magnitsky Act. Putin, by that time president of Russia again, also began to compile an “anti-Magnitsky” list of his own, according to the New York Times. Bharara was among the prominent names on it.

Trump Jr.’s conversation with Veselnitskaya, to his disappointment, focused on “a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government,” he said in a Sunday statement. That may be a roundabout way of saying Veselnitskaya wanted to discuss sanctions on Russian officials. Veselnitskaya campaigned unsuccessfully to keep Magnitsky’s name off the punitive 2012 law, according to the Times, and then, through an NGO called The Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGIF), to have it repealed, supposedly for the sake of Russian children who could find American homes if the adoption ban were lifted in response.

The latter activity got Veselnitskaya some unwanted attention. She is not named on HRAGIF’s list of lobbyists under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, but she was accused of lobbying U.S. politicians, according to an email provided to Sen. Grassley by Hermitage Capital in a complaint (Magnitsky was at work for Hermitage CEO William Browder when he discovered the alleged money-laundering scheme). HRAGIF listed only two lobbyists, one of whom is Renit Akhmetsin, the former agent for the Russian FSB security service who in April met with Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) in Berlin to discuss Prevezon. Russian friendliness to Rohrbacher has been a bone of contention with the FBI and the butt of “jokes” from Rohrbacher’s fellow Republicans. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told colleagues in an audio recording that surfaced in May: “There’s two people I think Putin pays, Rohrabacher and Trump.”

Magnitsky’s death, and the original theft by Russian bureaucrats, are believed by many, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), to be the work of the Klyuev Group, a network of criminals working in the Russian government to enrich themselves at the expense of Russian citizens (its exploits are chronicled in English in a number of articles by reporter Michael Weiss). Magnitsky and others sought to expose what they believed was hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of graft by the group.

The suit against Prevezon never went to trial. On March 11, Donald Trump fired Bharara, and on March 21, Nikolai Gorokhov, the Magnitsky family’s attorney and a key witness for the prosecution, fell from the fourth floor of an apartment building, apparently when a rope broke while he and others were trying to move a bathtub in through the window. He sustained head injuries.

The United States settled its case against Prevezon and its associated companies in May for $6 million, a fraction of the judgment a guilty verdict would likely have brought. Veselnitskaya declared victory on Facebook: “[A] 4-Year-old battle of the American State with a Russian citizen is over. With the Russians,” she wrote on Facebook.

As experts try to determine the depth of foreign espionage operations during the 2016 race, everything is starting to look like a cyberattack—and that’s by design.

For months on Twitter, in digital news and on cable TV, self-appointed pundits have been jumping at the shadows of the Russian hacking attacks on several components of the 2016 election. Experts say that paranoia is not merely a devastatingly effective side effect, but often the entire point of an intelligence operation: It causes the public to fear the erosion of democracy and paralyzes investigators who could repair problems like America’s elderly and unsophisticated voting machines, since every new revelation seems to reveal further cracks in the system.

The cyberattacks have damaged confidence in American democracy and shifted focus to finger-pointing at a time when repairing voting infrastructure could not be more urgent, said computer scientist J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan.

“NSA put those pieces together in April 2017 [according to an agency report leaked by The Intercept],” Halderman tells TPM. “There are still components of this that, within the intelligence community, are only now being able to be understood. That’s alarming. We need the election system to give us evidence that the election has been won before it’s certified.”

Lack of trust can destroy the courage to do anything except read conspiracy theories on the internet and despair, Halderman said. “The doubt at some point becomes the story, because it becomes an indication that the system isn’t doing its job.”

Toni Gidwani, formerly the leader of analyst teams at the Defense Intelligence Agency and now director of research operations at ThreatConnect, said the attacks during the 2016 U.S. elections are consistent with the modus operandi of Russian intelligence services as they operate throughout Europe. Despair is often their goal, she said.

“It’s a valid objective to just inject doubt into the integrity of the system,” Gidwani told TPM. “Just by showing that these machines are vulnerable even if you don’t change a single vote, may create doubt that the system is valid.”

Worsened public confidence in government, she said, is a consistent objective in intelligence operations, especially from Russia. “It’s a much lower bar to achieve than concretely affecting the outcome [of the vote].”

“Spies’ jobs are to hoover up all the information they can,” said Galeotti, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations with a specialization in Russian security, and author of the upcoming “Vory: The Story of the Russian Mafia” from Yale University Press. “Let’s not pretend that the NSA isn’t trying to get into any Russian system it can, or any German, French or British system for that matter. It’s the nature of intelligence.”

In fact, even the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other party operatives wasn’t completely beyond the pale–it was their distribution that crossed a red line, he argued.

“Russian cyberwarfare that we’ve seen so far has not really been cyberwarfare,” Galeotti said. “It’s phishing a few email addresses. None of this is really mission-critical stuff.”

In the disinformation campaign waged by Russia during the 2016 election, Galeotti sees the hand of both the GRU–likely the sponsor of the much discussed Fancy Bear hacking team–and its competitive sister agency, the FSB, which conducted operations through a less-discussed group called Cozy Bear. The GRU trained a disciplined internal team of hackers, he explained, while the FSB, more prone to risk-taking, acquired talented freelancers with threats, bribes, or some combination of the two, among them the recently arrested team behind the Yahoo hack.

“As I understand it, it wasn’t the GRU that said, ‘Let’s leak this,’ it was the FSB,” Galeotti said, referring to the stolen emails. The more cautious GRU acquired the emails, but “it was the FSB that pitched the idea of using it for a political operation, and there’s no question that it had sanction from the top,” he told TPM.

The resulting chaos means that much–too much–is now read as evidence of foreign intervention and subversion, even day-to-day information collection operations. Many experts in the field believe the problem is not that foreign powers are putting their puppets into office through stealing elections, but that election systems are low-hanging information fruit.

“I think the Russians have stumbled – probably accidentally, and not because they’re that much cleverer – onto the new kind of warfare, which is not kinetic,” said Galeotti.

“We are in this half-war-half-peace situation, which is very unlike the Cold War,” he continued. “Are we at war with the Russians, a non-shooting, non-kinetic political war? The Russians clearly think so, but the intelligence community has not been given permission to respond in kind.”

Pressure to examine voting machines used in the 2016 election grows daily as evidence builds that Russian hacking attacks were broader and deeper than previously known. And the Department of Homeland Security has a simple response:

No.

DHS officials from former secretary Jeh Johnson to acting Director of Cyber Division Samuel Liles may be adamant that machines were not affected, but the agency has not in fact opened up a single voting machine since November to check.

Asked about the decision, a DHS official told TPM: “In a September 2016 Intelligence Assessment, DHS and our partners determined that there was no indication that adversaries were planning cyber activity that would change the outcome of the coming US election.”

According to the most recent reports, 39 states were targeted by Russian hackers, and DHS has cited–without providing details–domestic attacks in its own reports as well.

“Although we continue to judge all newly available information, DHS has not fundamentally altered our prior assessments,” the department told TPM.

Computer scientists have been critical of that decision. “They have performed computer forensics on no election equipment whatsoever,” said J. Alex Halderman, who testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about the vulnerability of election systems. “That would be one of the most direct ways of establishing in the equipment whether it’s been penetrated by attackers. We have not taken every step we could.”

Voting machines, especially the electronic machines still used in several states, are so insecure that an attack on them is likely to be successful, according to a report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice out Thursday morning. David Dill, a voting systems expert and professor of computer science at Stanford University quoted in the report, said hackers can easily breach election systems regardless of whether they’re able to coordinate widely enough to alter a general election result.

DHS told TPM Wednesday afternoon it was confident in “multiple checks and redundancies in US election infrastructure” and referred to the testimony of Liles and Jeannette Manfra, DHS undersecretary for cybersecurity, who said US electoral systems were fortified by “diversity of systems, non-Internet connected voting machines, pre-election testing, and processes for media, campaign, and election officials to check, audit, and validate results.”

The new Brennan Center report, however, details the dangers of voting machines that aren’t properly secured, particularly the effect on public confidence of a very public successful hack, whether or not it managed to swing an election. “In the current hyper-partisan environment,” the authors noted, “evidence of this kind of hack could lead to accusations by each side that the other is rigging the election.”

While forensic examinations would answer many questions vital to researchers trying to improve voting systems, the potential for eroded confidence in those systems may help to explain DHS’ reluctance to seek out hard evidence. The department said most attacks were simple scanning, rather than attempts to alter tallies or poll books.

Evidence always seems to stop with “we don’t know:” An NSA report leaked to The Intercept in June detailed a phishing operation by the Russian military intelligence agency GRU on voting hardware maker VR Systems that in turn targeted voting officials. Like DHS, the NSA said it was unclear whether those officials’ machines had been compromised.

Some of the paralysis around how to move forward is a result of tensions between DHS and states angry about the designation of their election systems as “critical infrastructure” in January, just before President Trump took office. Then-secretary Johnson even acknowledged at the time that the designation was controversial to many state election officials, who see the offer of federal assistance, often with strings attached, as an attempted takeover (Johnson testified last week that when a critical infrastructure designation was first floated to state officials in August, the reaction “ranged from neutral to negative”).

“They’re in this strange position where they had a lot of pushback from election officials over federal overreach and in some ways they’re in a little bit of a bind,” said the Brennan Center’s Larry Norden, one of the authors of its report.

Everyone knows what has to be fixed, Norden says, but no one wants to go first. “The states want the counties to act, the counties want the state to pay for things, the states may want the money but they don’t want any of the mandates that come with the money,” he says. “There are investigations but there are no positive solutions yet.”

Current auditing processes, which vary wildly from state to state, are frequently arduous and sometimes nonsensical. In Virginia, where the margin of victory is often very shallow, it is illegal to audit the vote except when the margin is more than 10 percent—and only then if the local election official agrees, and after the election has been certified. When that audit takes place, it can’t change the outcome of the election, even if the audit reveals a completely different tally.

Cybersecurity expert Jeremy J. Epstein says the Virginia rule illustrates why widespread changes to voting standards are so difficult: Every place has different rules. In many states, “localities have almost no ability to raise funds,” Epstein observes. “Even if the state wants to do something, getting 130 localities in Virginia to do something that requires action at a local level is very hard to do.”

The dangers are real: Some voting machines still use Windows XP, which Microsoft hasn’t updated in years. Epstein has personally demonstrated huge security flaws in others. In 2015, he successfully campaigned to decertify the AVS WinVote machine, a touchscreen device that used a woefully outdated and insecure wireless protocol called WEP, which can be hacked in three minutes. Epstein pulled off the hack successfully and was able to retrieve the WinVote’s factory-set passwords: “abcde” and “admin.”

Halderman, too, has dramatically demonstrated how easy it is to take over voting machines, in one case simply by loading a voting machine with a memory card filled with malicious software that can then hitch a ride on that machine back to the central location where the votes are tallied (Machines are left unguarded so often that Ed Felten, who worked in the Obama White House as a deputy chief technology officer, used to make a tradition of posting pictures of them to his and Halderman’s blog, Freedom to Tinker).

In fact, Halderman testified before the Senate Intelligence panel that not only could he successfully breach voting machines himself, but he had made the process part of his assigned coursework.

“I know firsthand how easy it can be to manipulate computerized voting machines,” he told the Senate. “As part of security testing, I’ve performed attacks on widely used voting machines, and I’ve had students successfully attack machines under my supervision.”

These computer scientists agree the problem is urgent and nonpartisan, and no less a Trump ally than Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that he believed the problem was serious, too. Even in the polarized post-election environment, Norden says he thinks legislators may be able to agree on the issue need to secure voting systems.

“The intelligence community has been pretty clear that while [the Russian hacking teams] may have favored Trump in the election, their interest is in undermining our democracy,” said Norden. “Regardless of party, I think we all share the idea that democracy is essential to the country.”